AMayhar - The Conjure Read online

Never asked him to pay for them, either. Seemed she made a lot of money selling her paintings of the woods and plants and animals, though King thought that was just about the strangest thing he ever heard of. If money could be made by splashing paint onto paper, it seemed likely that every Tom, Dick, and Harry would be doing it instead of cutting logs in the woods or raising broiler chickens.

  He gulped his coffee while sitting on the porch, dangling his calloused feet off the edge and spitting between the cracks from time to time to make the moccasins hiss with anger. He munched some cornpone for breakfast, washed it down with buttermilk, and dug out his boots.

  It didn't do to go barefoot after a flood. You found snakes in the damndest places, and moccasins weren't the worst you could get bit by. Coral snakes could kill you before you had time to think hard about dying. Copperheads were dangerous, too.

  He was too old to risk having to fight off snakebite, though when he was young a moccasin bite hardly made him sick. In the old days it just made him ornery for a week or so, but he was so ornery already that nobody would have noticed. That was one reason why he lived to himself, shunning other people. Once he'd killed a man, and it still bothered him to think about it.

  He donned his boots, took his shotgun off its pegs over his iron cookstove, caught up his walking stick, and set off toward the river, watching where he stepped. The brush and grass were rippled by the action of the water, and drifts of debris were caught among them. The paths, when he followed them, were slippery and treacherous, so he kept his stick braced against any accident.

  He followed his own private creek, which meandered through the forest he had preserved uncut for all his seventy years. In places the bank had been undercut and had fallen into the stream, but he knew from old experience that the water would soon find a way around the obstacle and continue toward the river.

  His huge magnolia tree, sixty feet tall to the broken place and nine feet in diameter, loomed ahead; he paused beside it, leaning against one of the gnarled buttress roots. He'd slept inside its hollow more than once, back before the rheumatics got to him, curled in a blanket and looking up that hollow shaft to see a tiny circle of stars staring back at him. He patted the rough root and moved on.

  The creek ran loudly between the sweetgums and pines on either side, its current far out of its banks. Yellow foam gathered around button willows and stumps; logs, branches, bits and pieces were piled over just about every obstacle to its course. A rusty bucket he recognized as one he threw away years before sat upright beside a hickory tree, its pocked sides slimed with mud.

  He moved clear of the creek and cut across a bend toward the river. There was no use taking inventory of everything, and he wanted to see what had come downstream from the bigger creeks.

  Before he reached his goal he came to a knee-deep mudhole among post-oaks, where something darkened a spot on the far side. King was nothing if not curious. He grunted with weariness, but he persisted until he dragged his reluctant feet through the mud to examine his find. Then he really did grunt.

  A man's body, dressed in camouflage gear like hunters wore in the fall, lay sprawled in a tangle of sawvines and huckleberry bushes. The thing was swollen, its shirt split by internal pressures; its pants, tattered and ripped by passage through the flood, were only a sort of flap around his waist. The smell wasn't very bad, yet, but it was going to be before very long.

  It wasn't hard to see what killed the son of a bitch, either. There was a crease down the middle of his skull, though the scalp wasn't broken. Just the bone. Somebody had hit that sucker a mean lick, that was for certain sure.

  Damn! If he told Irene to call in the law, they'd tramp all over his land and mess up his woods. While it had been years since he'd fed that pushy timber buyer to the grampa catfish in the big eddy, and there was no sign the fellow had ever set foot on Deport land, he'd just as soon that didn't happen.

  No, he needed to send this corpse on its way down to the river. Nobody would ever know where he came from, if he made it far enough to be found. With the gators and the big gar on the prowl for meat, it wasn't likely he would.

  But dammit, King knew he wasn't able to do the job. No, he needed help, and the only one he could think of to help him was old Possum Choa, upstream in the swamp. That was a long step, and it would take him a while. He knew he'd better get moving in that direction.

  He knew every short-cut, of course, at least as well as Choa and better than anyone else in the world besides the two of them. He kept himself going, though his joints protested worse and worse as he went. He kept clear of the lowest country, knowing it would still be submerged or else hip-deep in gluey mud.

  Making a swing up into the pine woods, he picked up a track. By damn, it was Possum's, or he'd gone blind and stupid. Seemed to be heading out of the swamp, toward the McCarver place.

  Sighing with relief, King propped himself against a stump, first checking to make sure some snake hadn't set up a prior claim, and leaned back to wait. If Possum had gone, then he was sure to come back, and this was the shortest way to the location of his cabin from old Lena's.

  Maybe he'd have a sack of goodies when he appeared, too. King never tasted sweets unless he visited the McCarver house, and Lena wasn't as fond of him as she was that black Indian.

  Oatmeal cookies was the most she'd break out for him, though he didn't really blame her. When he was a boy he'd warted the life out of her and her mother. Besides, he'd had the gall to ask her to marry him, knowing she would be insulted at the thought.

  Witches didn't marry, she had told him all through their childhood. Witches witched. Nobody had ever known who her daddy was—or asked, if they valued their hides. Anybody who would dare get that close to Lena's mother had to have been a brave man or a damn fool.

  He closed his eyes, leaned his head back against the damp pulp of the stump, and dozed in the sun. Hot as it was, muggy with steam rising from the sodden land, his old bones found the warmth comforting, and soon he was fast asleep.

  Something bumped his toe, and he woke with a jerk. “Possum?” He squinted at the dark shape looming against the glary sky. “That you?"

  There came a grunt in reply, and the man squatted beside him, laying a bulging bag between his knees. “How'd you know I was out? And how'd you smell Miz Lena's bakin’ from so far away?” he asked. “I knowed you was sharp, old man, but I never thought you had a nose that good."

  King chuckled. “I come to ask you a favor, Possum. I found somethin’ along my creek that I need to send on downriver, but I've got so damn old and stove up that I can't manage it by myself. I need a younger man to help me."

  The bright black eyes blazed into his. “Wouldn't be you found a dead man, now would it?” he asked.

  King felt a shiver travel down his back. Indians had their ways, he knew, but he'd never known Possum to show much talent in that direction. “How'd you know?” he asked. “You didn't ... you didn't kill somebody, did you?"

  Possum opened the mouth of the bag and let a tantalizing aroma drift out. “He'p yourself,” he said to King. “And I'll tell you my tale while you eat."

  King stretched out his legs, set his straw hat at an angle to protect his face from the now blazing sun, and took a deep bite out of a fried apple tart. But as Possum's story unwound he found himself forgetting to chew.

  "You mean you sent them bodies downstream, thinkin’ they'd go all the way to the river, but it started in to rain and sidetracked one into my creek? That's sort of strange, when you think about it."

  "Seems that's what happened. And now I wonder where the other one is. I saw that man Oscar kill the both of ‘em, and they sure as shootin’ was dead when I put ‘em onto those logs. I kind of hoped they'd get down where somebody would see ‘em and start askin’ awkward questions."

  He fumbled through the sack and came out with a handful of chocolate chip cookies, took a big bite, and sat munching companionably as King digested the information.

  "Well, be it as it may, he's do
wn there where he's no business bein', and I don't want no lawmen trompin’ around my woods, scarin’ the birds and all the little critters. Let's go get him out of there and send him on his way,” the old man said at last.

  "Mebbe there'll be enough left, time the gators get through, to make some trouble for the folks that ought to suffer from it."

  Possum sighed and rose, reaching down a hand to help King get onto his feet. He didn't insult him by offering an arm, King noted with satisfaction, but he did reach out to take the shotgun. That left both Deport's arms free to manage his walking stick and grab onto bushes and trees to keep his wayward legs from betraying him.

  Together they trudged off through the pine woods, down the almost imperceptible slopes to the lowlands, and found the paths leading along ridges that rose beside the many creeks. They stopped to rest when King found himself tottering too badly, and every time they ate more of Lena's provender.

  By the time they came to the big mud puddle King remembered, he was feeling more energetic. The water had gone down even more, now, and the body lay among the bushes with green flies making a frantic buzz about it. There was no sign of the log to which Possum had bound it, for the flood waters and floating debris had almost bared it to the skin.

  "Nasty job,” Possum muttered. “I never thought I'd have to do this twice!” He pulled the body across the mud and down to the side of the creek, where he rested it over a log that had floated in with the flood.

  "Seems I ought to float it down this creek and heave it out into the river my own self. Still, that's risky. Might be some fool out there in a boat, just waitin’ to see me do it."

  "We can go along the bank beside it and untangle it if it gets caught,” King said. His legs said otherwise, but he ignored them sternly.

  "I ought to've done that in the beginning, but I thought those two would hang up along the big creek and I could push ‘em along the next morning. That rain caught me unawares; my bones didn't ache ary a time to give me warnin'."

  King nodded. Not often did his own rheumatism fail to tell him when weather was brewing, but this time a storm had ripped up out of the Gulf of Mexico and taken even the weather men by surprise, according to what he heard on his battery radio.

  They got the corpse onto another log, tied it with lengths of fishing line, and set it off again on its journey downstream. “You go on back home,” Possum told King. “I ought to've done it right the first time, and it's my job to do. I'll make certain sure it gets where it needs to go, this go around."

  Sighing with relief, King nodded. He watched until the log was out of sight down the creek and Possum was lost among the willows and gum trees.

  Then he turned and stumped his way back toward his stilt-legged cabin, thinking about bodies and how they seemed to turn up, from time to time, no matter how clean you kept your nose. Well, this one was out of his way, and there would be no excuse for the sheriff to poke around on his land.

  He found himself standing beside the big eddy where grampaw catfish lived. He thumped his stick against the ground, and bubbles began to rise. The big flat head drifted into view below the muddy water, and one large eye regarded him thoughtfully.

  King reached into his pocket and pulled out a bundle, which he carried with him every time he ranged across his domain. Inside was a chunk of fat pork, which he flung into the water.

  The wide mouth opened, and the fatback disappeared. There was a concentric ring of ripples left on the surface, and the catfish was gone again. Just like the time he fed that bastard to grampaw. A hungry giant of a catfish was a handy thing to have around at times.

  CHAPTER V. Out Into the Light of Day

  Possum Choa kept as far from his charge as possible, for as the afternoon grew even hotter the corpse became intolerable. When the log hung up on tangles of brush or temporary dams of floating logs and debris, he poked it free with a long pole he had cut from a hickory sapling. Even then he was nearer than he wanted to be.

  The entire complex of creeks and marshes stunk, in fact. The drowned bodies of small animals had now floated to the surface, and the mud flats created by the flood added their own peculiar taint to the overall effect. Choa wasn't particularly averse to smells of all kinds, but even he found the combination sickening.

  The afternoon wore away, and he kept after the balky log and its load, which moved more and more slowly as the water ran down and the current slowed. At the last he was having to wade out into the water and push the thing ahead of him with his pole, but by sundown he was able to give a last heave and sigh with relief.

  The log bobbed out into the biggest creek running into the river. Below that point there were no more bends.

  He ran along the bank, looking for logjams caused by the flood, but they had all been carried away downstream. From here on, that body would go no place but into the river.

  He didn't intend to let up now, of course. Though loggers had cut the timber near the creek's mouth and for some distance along the river itself, they had left a line of trees to stabilize the banks. Choa ducked into that and kept pace with the log, watching as it bobbed along more quickly in the stronger current that now had it in its grip.

  Only when the sun was down and it was too dark to see did he leave off the pursuit and turn his weary steps toward the swamp and his cabin. He cut directly through the woods, knowing unerringly how to avoid low spots still sticky from the flood, and he came out just where he intended.

  He had left his log boat tied to a willow at the edge of the creek that led closest to the McCarver place. Now he got into the craft, loosed it from its tether, and paddled his way slowly through the croaking, chirring, flapping, tree-frog-screeching darkness toward the swamp.

  The old cheese-paring moon was rising by the time he reached home. His bag of goodies was only a limp bundle, now, for he and King had depleted its contents, but he made an early breakfast of sweets, drank about a pint of cold sassafrass tea, and tumbled onto his cot, clothes and all. His wife would have protested, but she had been gone so long that Choa had forgotten the niceties she taught him.

  His catfish lines could wait; he was too old for this kind of nonsense, and he intended to sleep the clock around, if that was what it took.

  When he opened his eyes again, the slant of the light told him it was after noon. The heat had glued his sweaty shirt to his back and his pants to his legs; he struggled out of bed, yawned widely, and ambled toward the pier to wash himself. Stripping off his clothing, he waded into the blood-warm water and began splashing it onto his skin, scrubbing himself hard with twisted handfuls of cat-tail leaves.

  As he waded out again, feeling minnows tickling his calves and perch nibbling about his ankles, he heard a roar from beyond his garden. Lena's shotgun, by damn. She'd heard or intuited or witched something up, or she would never have signaled.

  Much refreshed by the long sleep and his bath, Choa donned a clean (or relatively clean) pair of hickory striped overalls over a washed out khaki shirt. Again he put on his boots, which now were all but useless, and set off for Lena's house. This time he left his boat at the pier, for he might have to side-track past King Deport's place before he returned.

  When he came within hailing distance, he saw Lena on her porch, waving that blue apron again. She gestured for him to hurry, and he ran the last quarter-mile, arriving almost winded at her steps.

  "The bodies you told me about? One of ‘em got pulled ashore down at Samson Springs Marina. It's in the news, and I got it over the radio. The sheriff is all excited, and the federal boys seem to think it's connected with drugs.” She snickered knowingly.

  "They think there was a falling-out among the drug runners, and the shipment they waited for all night earlier in the week might be hidden someplace in the river bottoms. What do you think about that?” Her shoe-button eyes were bright.

  "I think they're most likely right,” Choa said, grinning. “And they can look till their eyes pop right out of their skulls and never find hide nor hair of an
y drugs—not unless they're on good speaking terms with a whole passel of alligators."

  They laughed together, and Lena gestured for him to sit on her porch swing while she went inside for refreshments. “The onliest thing that bothers me is they'll go messin’ around on old King's land, and that always upsets him something fierce,” she added, sitting beside him and setting her teacup on her bony lap.

  So Possum Choa told her the tale of his adventures with King Deport the day before, and she made a fine audience, oohing and chuckling and nodding at all the right places. “But King's going to be powerful mad if they poke around his land or come to his house,” she added, when he was done. “Even if he did help set the thing off on its way."

  Choa nodded, in his turn. He knew King too well to think the old fellow would welcome anyone coming around his land. “Wasn't there talk, a long time ago, about some timber cruiser disappearing down that way?” he asked Lena. “Back when I was just married."

  Lena looked at him over the rim of her cup, those black eyes shining. “There was. But nobody ever found out where he went or what happened to him ... and we don't want to know, do we?"